Editorial: A New Breed of Cop, part 2 of 4

Tuesday

Jul 31, 2007 at 12:01 AMJul 31, 2007 at 8:49 PM

Editorial series about police and the mentally ill.

Memphis, Tenn., Police Major Sam Cochran has his hands full.

There he is on CNN, talking about his department's Crisis Intervention Team program (CIT), which host Soledad O'Brien says has minted "a new breed of cop." There he is co-authoring a report -- "Improving Police Response to Mentally Ill People" -- for a psychiatric journal. There he is planning a conference at which attendees will discuss topics like excited delirium, homelessness and "suicide by cop."

For Cochran, it goes with the job description. The veteran cop is coordinator for Memphis' CIT, started 20 years ago after a mentally ill man's shooting death by officers. Cochran recalls "a serious outcry," which led to the program now hailed as national model.

Yesterday, this page listed the names of seven central Illinois men, thought to have had mental problems, who in the past decade died in confrontations with local law enforcement. Though investigations generally concluded that police acted appropriately, these deaths have prompted renewed discussion of police tactics and training.

Cochran remembers that some dialogue already was under way between Memphis police and the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) before 27-year-old Joseph Robinson was killed in 1987.

NAMI members felt Memphis officers -- who got about eight hours of training, considered high then -- were not prepared to handle loved ones suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, etc.

"There was a serious hesitation about calling law enforcement to their homes -- a trepidation," Cochran says. "Basically, they were saying, 'Your officers aren't trained?'"

Memphis's research into other practices found some departments that relied on privately run mobile crisis teams, similar to Peoria's Emergency Response Service. But families told police that such units tended to be chronically understaffed and slow to respond, while one day of training a year wasn't enough to defuse the land mine of mental illness.

Police listened. In conjunction with NAMI, the University of Memphis, the University of Tennessee Medical Center and others, they came up with the following:

CIT officers.

These specialized volunteers form the core of the program in Memphis, where a quarter of its 1,000-plus cops are front-line responders. CIT officers take over at scenes where a mentally ill person is engaged with police, letting that person know whom to talk to. This expedites, and often neutralizes, interactions where tension and fear run high, since those with psychiatric problems may not respond as others would to police commands.

But CIT officers prepare for this reality through rigorous training -- a minimum 40 hours -- in which they learn about symptoms and medications; about the suicidal, mentally retarded and elderly with dementia; about commitment laws; and about how alcohol and drugs can aggravate an unstable person's behavior.

Community participation.

CIT officers are trained -- for free -- by NAMI members and psychiatric experts. Their learning goes well beyond the classroom, including lengthy sit-downs with families and the mentally ill themselves. At first it's a nervous meeting, but what results can be a revelation: Both parties explain how they see the other and try to reach common ground. Officers engage in role play.

Thanks to a larger buy-in from the medical community, Memphis police transport patients directly to the University of Tennessee Medical Center instead of relying on a mobile units. Citizens, meanwhile, know from public awareness ad campaigns to tell dispatchers whether a loved one having a breakdown has had a history of problems.

An emphasis on less-than-lethal force.

Whenever possible, Memphis police try to de-escalate a bad situation without regular guns. "You try to open a dialogue, slow things down, move the crowd away," Cochran explains. CIT officers must be good communicators, better listeners. The goal is to soothe a scene before it climbs to the point where police draw weapons.

When they must act, officers determine whether it's appropriate to use bean bags, chemicals or rubber projectiles, the latter of which are shot from a weapon that resembles a tommy gun. In a July 2000 U.S. Department of Justice bulletin, Cochran described how police used that gun to subdue a man threatening them with long-blade scissors. When pepper spray didn't work, they shot him in the leg from eight feet away.

Cochran stresses that having a CIT program is no guarantee against injuries or fatalities. Nonetheless, "from my personal observation and judgment, I have seen many incidents where I can say, 'This could have easily gone another way had CIT officers not been present.'"

Ownership of the program.

"You have to develop this model within the context that CIT is not a law enforcement program -- it's a community program," says Cochran. It takes many stakeholders -- state officials, hospitals, police, the public -- to get it going and working. So far, it is, in departments from California to Florida, from Iowa to Texas. In Illinois, more than 100 municipalities participate.

The first to do so in this state was Springfield, in conjunction with Sangamon County. Some there were skeptical, explained Deputy Chief Mike Geiger. "Somebody might think initially, 'Oh, crisis intervention? Are they just bleeding-heart do-gooders?'" But since 2003, about one-sixth of Springfield's 280-member force -- slightly larger than Peoria's -- has stepped up for CIT training. "We got the whole spectrum from the officer pool, from SWAT team folks to crime prevention officers," Geiger says.

One key thing police in Springfield and elsewhere have learned is to treat the mentally ill as human beings -- not as "nut jobs" or "bad guys," terms that underscore a distrust between cops and an element of the public they serve.

"It's a sign of our own ignorance that we use these words," Geiger says.

"If your kid had juvenile diabetes, you probably wouldn't be hesitant to share that. But if your kid was diagnosed with schizophrenia, that drives a lot of people underground."

And changing such attitudes produces impressive results. One study, performed through a federal Justice Department grant by renowned criminal justice/sociology researcher Dr. Henry Steadman, compared Memphis' response with others and found it had the fewest criminal arrests of the mentally ill, while using physical force the least during incidents "involving the threat of fear or violence." The CIT program also showed the fastest response times and less total time spent on such calls.

Indeed, Major Cochran says CIT has resulted in fewer officer injuries and fewer calls that require a SWAT response. Furthermore, it has created a better relationship between police, hospitals and family members, many of whom trust CIT officers enough to request them specifically.

No wonder it's catching on. But not here. Not yet.

Tomorrow: Talking to Peoria-area law enforcement.

Peoria (Ill.) Journal Star

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